For 25 years I worked in downtown Santa Barbara and loved being there, but these days I rarely visit downtown, and when I do I don’t find much that makes me want to visit more often. In fact, I prefer to avoid the area.
Last week, I took a walk down State Street, from Victoria to Ortega streets. The red brick sidewalks were fuliginously filthy, many storefronts remain empty save for the “for lease” signs — and then there are the homeless, ubiquitous, shuffling along with their piled-up shopping carts. They seem to outnumber the thinning ranks of other pedestrians.
Vibrancy has been replaced with vagrancy.
There was hardly a sidewalk, paseo or passageway that I walked that wasn’t haunted by the homeless. At the corner of State and Carrillo streets, a disheveled, pungently malodorous man sat viciously shouting out obscenities that could be heard a block away.
Santa Barbara has long been a magnet for destitute vagrants — if for no other reason than its mild climate — but now the unabated influx of homeless has reached a certain critical mass that has an obvious negative impact on the city. Loud menacing mendicants, persistent panhandlers and the foul hygiene are bad enough, but the many makeshift homeless encampments are sources of untreated sewage and wildfires that endanger the entire community.
The homeless problem is bad in Santa Barbara, but by order of magnitude it is worse in larger cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
When the homeless were rousted out of their encampments in Los Angeles, they didn’t leave town. They drifted into nearby neighborhoods and squatted in alleyways, parks and other public spaces. Residents soon found their neighborhoods infested with homeless, and far less comfortable and safe.
Homelessness is not peculiar to California. It is a national problem, a manifestation of a society torn and frayed by a perverted form of capitalism that works exceedingly well for a small minority of Americans but not as well for everyone else. Income and wealth disparity have sharply increased over the past 30 years and shows no signs of abating.
Aggravating the unraveling of the social fabric are misguided public policies that misallocate resources to questionable priorities. Is victimless crime more of a problem than homelessness?
The estimated homeless population in the United States is estimated at about 560,000. Some of that population may choose to be panhandling hobos, but most live on the streets because they are too poor to afford proper housing.
The prison population of the United States is about 2.2 million. About 450,000 of this population are in for drug law infractions. They are mostly nonviolent offenders who pose little threat to public safety.
It is drug prohibition that results in property crime and violent crime. As for addiction, it can occur whether the drug is prescribed or proscribed, and is better addressed with treatment than with punishment.
The latest comprehensive calculations find that the total direct cost of incarceration in the United States hovers around $91 billion annually. That averages to an annual cost of more than $41,000 per prisoner. So, taxpayers are paying nearly $19 billion per year to administer, house, feed and provide healthcare for thousands of people imprisoned for nonviolent, victimless exercises of personal liberty involving drugs.
As more states legalize marijuana, the prison population should drop. And, even if marijuana shops pop up like Starbucks on every street corner would that really present a greater negative impact to communities than having the homeless encamped at every street corner?
The City of Santa Barbara has been agonizing over the number and location of marijuana shops that should be permitted in the city. The fear is that those shops will somehow attract unsavory people, even criminals who will distribute marijuana to children. Seriously?
As a 47-year resident of Santa Barbara, I am more concerned by the homeless hordes degrading the condition of our city than by people who choose to use marijuana. Would that city officials focus on the former with the intensity that they do on the latter.
Which brings us back to misallocated resources and misguided priorities. Rather than spending billions of dollars incarcerating folks whose only crime is choosing a drug that busybodies disapprove of, spend it on folks who are guilty only of being poor. How much would our everyday lives be improved if there were fewer homeless on our streets rather than more harmless people in prison?
How many homeless folks could be housed for $19 billion per year? Dividing $19 billion by 560,000 homeless yields nearly $34,000 each. The federal poverty rate for an individual is $12,140, and for a four-person household, $24,600. Even in places like Santa Barbara, $34,000 could go a long way in getting folks off the streets.
The fabric of society won’t be mended until enough of us understand what is causing the fraying and fix it.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.